Relative Something

If you own an iPad / an iPhone 4 or 5 / or an iPod Touch running iOS 7.0 or later, you are in luck to download the latest game craze before everyone you know is already playing it! That is because SparkBall was just released yesterday by Orbosphere Development Studio and is now available for free as an Apple iTunes App Store download.

Our son, Julian, is at it again, and this time he has created a downloadable game. SparkBall is so simple that anyone can play it immediately. It is a fantastic exercise in eye-hand coordination and reaction time on a touch screen that becomes fiendishly hard to quit. If you have addictive tendencies, watch out for this one!

All you have to do is tap the bouncing balls to remove them from the screen. The trick is in figuring out how far ahead of the ball you should tap to avoid missing it as it goes by. That is not simple to do because the speed of the balls is changing as a result of impacts with other balls. It creates an eternal urge to try again. If at first you don’t succeed…

I was lucky enough to secure a brief interview with the developer yesterday evening by email. I figured I better be quick to contact him before he gets buffered by agents and lawyers managing his affairs. I found the man who works under the moniker of “Orbosphere” to be refreshingly candid…

Was there anything in particular that inspired you to create SparkBall? And/or are there any arcade style games you are especially fond of? (This may seem a bit technical, but) I believe the inspiration began when Apple released the SpriteKit framework within iOS7– since I was already familiar with iOS development, the release of SpriteKit brought me the closest opportunity to get into game development that I’ve had yet, at least from a programming perspective. There were already several 3rd party frameworks for making games on iOS, but something about one being “baked in” with Apple made it seem more quickly attainable for me.

Initially, SparkBall was meant to be a different type of game, with a different set of rules. The tap-to-remove element was originally just me getting comfortable writing some code with SpriteKit, just a test really. But it was quickly apparent that it was kinda fun to try to tap the ball as it bounced across the screen. So I set out to make that a type of “game mode” for SparkBall, which became version 1. Perhaps I will still add different game modes in the future.

Did you create the music and the game sounds?
No, Jaywalker did. (So, yes.) Still not sure where to make the distinctions between which elements belong to which “brand name”… because I could also say yes, orbosphere did it. But then where do I draw the line? Genre doesn’t exclude something from the Jaywalker brand. It is the same in the end.

I was working on the song prior to SparkBall, or at least independently of it, originally. Eventually I didn’t really know what to do with the song (or how to finish writing it) and it just kind of clicked– put it in the game. Let it just loop. It will make it matter less that I didn’t know how to finish writing it. Video game audio composition would certainly be an interesting area to explore further for that very reason.

How long of a song is it before it loops? It does loop, doesn’t it?
03:16. It should restart at the end… I can’t guarantee that it loops perfectly in time, but it may be close.

Since you have a job as an iOS developer, was it like working two jobs while you were creating SparkBall?
No, not really. I certainly worked on it at my leisure– sometimes a couple nights in a row when my brain was hooked on certain problems, sometimes I’d let a week or maybe two go by. And I enjoyed the development– I’ll explain it to non-developers that in the right setting* development can be like playing with Legos, only, the bricks are inside your head, as well as the computer’s.

*Right Setting might indicate lack of a project manager hovering over your shoulder, looming critical deadlines and such.

Did you get addicted to playing it when it was far enough along to do so?
Pretty quickly, as I said earlier the tap-to-remove element wasn’t the initial plan. Once it was noticed how fun that was, I was hooked.

Do you like to pop bubble wrap?
Of course. You know there’s an app for that? (And I don’t mean SparkBall.)

Yes, I know there is an app for that, but it isn’t nearly as fun as the increasing intensity of more and more balls to be dispatched on each successive level that SparkBall offers.

Thanks, Julian, and congratulations on a wonderful accomplishment and treat of a game that you have created for everyone to enjoy. I hope it goes viral!

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